task bar notification area cluttered

[Guest]

Hi

I have XP Home and about 20 icons showing in the notification area on the
right hand side of my task bar. What I'd like to do is hide all the icons not
in use except for my clock and my wireless internet connection icon. I've
tried doing this under properties but only five are hidden. So my questions
are:

1- How can I tuck them all away to free up task bar space?
2- If I hide, say, the Norton Antivirus icon will it show itself in the
event of a problem/alert?
3- I can't see the point of some of the icons being there at all (like my
Logitech keyboard icon). How can I permanently remove the ones I don't really
need there?

Thanks

 

[Rock]

Hi

I have XP Home and about 20 icons showing in the notification area on the
right hand side of my task bar. What I'd like to do is hide all the icons
not
in use except for my clock and my wireless internet connection icon. I've
tried doing this under properties but only five are hidden. So my
questions
are:

1- How can I tuck them all away to free up task bar space?
2- If I hide, say, the Norton Antivirus icon will it show itself in the
event of a problem/alert?
3- I can't see the point of some of the icons being there at all (like my
Logitech keyboard icon). How can I permanently remove the ones I don't
really
need there?

Thanks

Whether an icon set to always hide will pop up when it has something
important to communicate depends on each program.

First step should be to check in the options for the program represented by
the icon to see if there is a setting to tell it not to put an icon in the
taskbar. If that option is not present look for one that tells it not to
run at startup. If that doesn't work the next step is to remove any entries
you don't want from the two startup folders:

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

For anything else uncheck their entries in the startup tab of msconfig:
Start | Run | Msconfig | Ok

Another option is to remove the reference to them from one of these keys in
the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce

Make sure you have a backup of the registry using a program like ERUNT
before making any changes to the registry.

ERUNT
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/erunt.txt

Installing and Using ERUNT
http://www.silentrunners.org/sr_eruntuse.html
http://www.winxptutor.com/regback.htm

 

[Guest]

Hi Rock

I've got rid of some of the icons from the task bar notifcation area
following your advice. Some of them I just want to hide. Is there a reason
why when I choose 'always hide' from the properties, custom window that many
of them revert to the 'hide when inactive' after I restart my pc? Can I stop
them reverting?

 

[Rock]

Hi Rock

I've got rid of some of the icons from the task bar notifcation area
following your advice. Some of them I just want to hide. Is there a reason
why when I choose 'always hide' from the properties, custom window that
many
of them revert to the 'hide when inactive' after I restart my pc? Can I
stop
them reverting?

I have a couple that do that as well. One shows up ever boot, the other
every couple of boots. I know of no way to control this.